The Northland Fires
by Ta Paixao
Summary: "The way you see people is the way you treat them, and the way you treat them is what they become." He became what they feared most, and Northland would never be the same. Detached from any sense of realism, so self-aware she's lost touch with her own humanity, Bella stands on a rooftop ledge toying with gravity in search of self-actualization.
1. Chapter 1

_Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended._

**A/N:** Re-posting this here now that I've started updating this story again. You can catch up through chapter 5 on my blog: tapaixao . com. I've also started re-posting Crashed on my blog. The chapters are edited and altered, including some plot changes. On a personal note, I'm moving out of state in a little over a month. Updates will be slow during the move period, but as I may not have a job for awhile, maybe I will get more writing done. ;-)

Story beta: **Hadley Hemingway**

* * *

**The Northland Fires**

**Chapter 1**

What motivates a man to engineer his own demise? I've thought on this question and almost nothing else for some time. Perhaps because I still cannot fathom the answer. Though I know it occurred, witnessed the spiral unwind, heard the words spoken with utmost veracity, I am not certain that I comprehend the depth of meaning to say that I truly understand. In short, loyalty. Loyalty of the strictest conviction. Oaths sealed in blood. Consider for a moment the one person for whom you'd take a bullet. People pledge such things without thought of probability. Think on one life for which yours would be forfeit. Swear it. Now prove it.

Death. Death interested me. I suppose it began when I was six years old and found my mother's tumefied body lying in a bathtub of blood and water. She had been there, decomposing, just long enough for the fresh bruises to rise to the surface of her skin. Eyes closed, she appeared peaceful, relieved. I don't know what propelled me-curiosity, I suppose-but I stuck my finger in the water and watched the liquid drip from the tip of my nail.

Horror is a subjective term. What horrifies one can have little effect on another. Renee's death didn't traumatize me. I was envious that she escaped and left me behind. But then she always was the selfish sort. Her protective instincts only extended to herself, but not so far as to propel her feet to walk out the front door. So she slashed her wrists toward her elbows and slipped away one pint at a time.

The blade lay on the bath mat beside the tub. With it I sliced open the pad of my thumb, just to know what it felt like.

Before she died, my grandmother once told me I had an old soul. Maybe that was her way of suggesting I would die young. I hadn't felt anything in years. Not since the first time my mother's boyfriend slapped a leather belt across my backside. Maybe Charlie was my father and maybe he wasn't. They collared me with his last name and that was the end of it.

Until Charlie came home from work, I sat in the bathroom and watched her body bloat. The stench was awful. He beat me for not calling him at the police station. He beat me for staring at her and for screaming when he pulled me away from the tub, my fingers feebly gripping the slippery edge as he yanked me by the waist. He beat me, I think, because he couldn't beat her anymore.

Women cried at her funeral while men stood blank-faced beside them. Our neighbors and Charlie's friends looked at me with questions in their eyes, if they looked at me at all. The same words were uttered as a matter of routine and without inflection. "I'm sorry for your loss." I didn't understand what loss they meant and I don't think they did either. I lost a buffer, not a mother. I lost a distraction, someone to occupy Charlie when he was drunk, angry, belligerent, or some combination of the three.

My mother made a beautiful corpse. Waylon Forge was a drunkard and a pill addict, but a master with an airbrush. Lying in her pillowed casket, Renee looked younger, healthier than I had ever seen. He took special care with this client. Waylon's affection for my mother wasn't a secret and it was blatant, in the gentle shade of pink he painted on her cheeks, that he found gratification in tending to her lifeless body, preparing it for her final public appearance.

I always looked in the caskets at wakes. Though I never felt a tingle of emotion in response to the vacant carcass, I stood there and tried, digging for a hint or glimpse, like closing your eyes, tensing your muscles, and trying to move an object with your mind. Everyone's tested the possibility of telekinesis at least once.

Following the funeral, where a few impersonal words were recited over her casket, The Pastor's wife hosted a reception at the church. Mrs. Weber delighted in any occasion to mix up a bowl of punch and lay colored plastic over long tables on which potluck casseroles were spread. The moment spoonfuls of gloppy muck were dropped on paper plates, everyone forgot about the dead woman buried a mile away. Suicide is such an ugly topic. Discussions turned to fishing and football, romance novels, and Maury Povich. Charlie ate with a strong appetite. I drew faces in my mashed potatoes.

The awkward glances and conspicuous silence around me lasted a day, maybe two. On the third, kids at school burst open with morbid questions as if the curiosity was suffocating them, faces turning red with the effort to hold their breath. The interrogations that began on the playground and carried through the rest of day didn't bother me. They were intrigued, fascinated by the grotesque details.

At first, I was confused by their interest, how they begged for more while cringing at the answers, their apparent inability to look away from the vivid horror. Then again, there is entertainment value in scary movies that turn our stomachs, prick our nerves, and force our hands to cover our eyes, even as we peek through the space between our fingers.

Death interested me because it evoked such emotion from other people. Observing them in moments of mourning and the progressive stages of grief was the closest I ever got to feeling something myself.

There are few things less original than apathetic youth.

Trudging through the mud and slush of the parking lot, I observed my classmates huddled together around warm vehicles. There was static in the air. Bits and pieces of disconnected conversation reached my ears. I was looking forward to the first day of school following winter break. For one thing, I'd had about all I could stand of being snowed in with Charlie. The house was too small and the only thing worse than the man when he drank was when he ran out beer. Though I would stop short of calling it excitement, there was a certain sense of anticipation to hear the morning announcements. Surely there had been a snowplow-related catastrophe somewhere.

Northland High School had a staggering mortality rate for such a small town. Three years ago, Stacey Leon was a freshman and sat beside me in English, until she dropped dead in the middle of Park Lane. While her parents were out at the bar on Labor Day, she got her arm stuck in the garbage disposal and bled out stumbling across the street to the neighbor's house. It then became routine for the principal's voice to come over the intercom to announce the departed souls lost during every holiday break from school. This kid wrapped his car around a tree, that one skidded off a cliff. Alcohol poisoning. Kicked by a horse. Ripped to shreds by a boat propeller.

After a moment of silence, during which eyes drifted toward the ceiling or stared at the indiscernible gunk under a fingernail, the principal would inform the student body that grief counselors were available in the library for anyone having trouble finding a nice, quiet pocket in which to stuff his or her feelings. The library would fill with students—some that had said two words to the deceased and some that hadn't—killing time while avoiding actual class work. I had a better reason. I watched for the red-faced, teary-eyed evidence of legitimate mourners. Anyone, anything, so long as it was real.

Slouching in my seat, I stared at the intercom on the wall of my American History class and dug blunt fingernails into my palms. Breath held. Foot tapping. Ticks of the clock like a metronome echoing inside my skull.

Crackle. Screech.

"Attention teachers and students, I regret to inform you…"

This was my blade across flesh. This was my Remaining Men Together with Bob and his bitch tits. Bella Swan, grief parasite.

**xXx**

Growing up in Northland felt like staring down an empty road with a flat tire. Miles of desolate nothing in either direction and no way forward. The tiny dystopia of provincial life was a poor approximation of Americana, distorted and warped. Football games and underage drinking. Shotguns and teenage brides. Sunday school and adultery. Ours was a small town that exerted the gravity of a black hole. Nothing escaped until it ceased to be. The friendships and enemies you made in preschool would follow you to your deathbed. Northland was no place to raise a child and a worse place to die.

Leah Clearwater knew this, so on New Year's Eve she swallowed a handful of Ambien rather than give birth to the tiny seed of regret gestating in her womb. She was the end-all and be-all of popularity in our senior class until she started showing and decided to bite it. Head cheerleader and all that important coming-of-age shit. But even the shiniest polished turd in high school still carries the stink of adolescence, so her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Sam Uley, dropped her like a rough bowel movement. He was a year ahead of us and had finally found himself a girl his own age, but not before giving Leah a last pity fuck.

Sitting in the library, I dug my thumbnail into a crack in the laminate wood tabletop. Hood over my hair, the dark strands spilling forward, I kept my head down and scanned the conversations around the room.

"I heard her parents wanted to send her to a convent or something."

"Uh-uh. Sam told her to get rid of it."

"Jessica told Angela that Lauren saw Leah's mom chase her out of the house on Christmas Eve, screaming in the driveway and calling Leah a whore."

"Oh, for fuck's sake, how about a little respect for the dead?" Long, tan legs swung over the edge of the table beside me. It was 40 degrees outside, but she was all skin and pleats in her cheerleader's uniform. Perks of having expired from the mortal realm. Leah leaned back on her flat palms as she surveyed the room. "Not a bad turnout."

"Bree Tanner had twice as many," I said, chipping away at the crack in the laminate. "And she was only a sophomore."

"Lucky shit." Crossing one leg over the other, Leah began gnawing on the cuticle of her thumb. "I put a lot of hard work into being popular. All she had to do was get cancer."

"Fate is a wicked mistress."

"Ain't that the truth." A bit of dead skin ripped from her nail bed was spit into the air, which got me thinking about household dust being mostly dead human flesh. Every day we lived in the filth of our own decay.

"What was it like?" I asked.

"What was what like?"

"Opening the bottle. Spilling the pills in your hand. Swallowing." I imagined her in the bathroom, staring at her reflection in the mirror while the tablets weighed like so many bullets in her palm. "What was it like to watch yourself die?"

"Did you ask your mommy the same question?" Bleached teeth gnawed at red, bloody cuticles. "How should I know?"

Two tables away, Jessica Stanley popped her gum, lips smacking. "Think they'll let us skip second period?" The one and only time I had been invited to a sleepover at her house, the girls froze my underwear and put chocolate pudding in my sleeping bag. Later, while everyone else slept, I beheaded Jessica's Barbies and took a pair of scissors to a chunk of her hair. Our friendship wasn't meant to be.

Around the table, the future leaders of Northland stared with bland expressions at their phones. Jessica, the mayor's daughter. Mike Newtown, heir to Newton Mining and the wealthiest family in town. Together they made up a sort of Dollar Store version of Barbie and Ken. Less attractive and less versatile.

"We should get to leave early." Lauren Mallory was the principal's daughter and, therefore, infested these halls with impunity. She once had a teacher suspended for assigning homework the night of a volleyball match.

"I can't believe she went through with it," Jessica said. "I can barely swallow an Advil without gagging."

Lauren rolled her eyes. "Think about what you just said."

"What?"

"It's easy, babe." Mike stood, pressing against her while grabbing his crotch. "Just relax your jaw and cup the balls."

"Sit down, pencil dick." A yellow No. 2 somersaulted over the table from Tyler's direction. "If you ask me, Sam dodged a bullet on that one." Tyler Crowley was the star running back of the football team, destined to spend the middle ages of his life bent over a bar regaling no one in particular with the story of how he ran for 180 yards in a single game.

"Not like she had a choice." Lauren said. "It was either this or jab a wire hanger up her vag. She probably would have fucked that up anyway."

Since the pair were absent from the group, I assumed Angela Weber, the preacher's daughter, was on her knees with hands clasped at this very moment, paying homage to the altar of Ben Cheney's cock. When she showed up to math class smelling like cologne and ammonia, everyone understood that she'd just had a mouthful in the janitor's closet. But it kept her hymen intact.

"The truth is, Leah was just a pretty face who died a sad cliché." Lauren pulled out a container of vapor rub and dabbed a bit of the invisible jelly under her eyes. After a couple deep breaths through her nose, tears began to well. "We're supposed to feel sorry for her? Hello, it's called a condom. Besides, baby killers rot in hell." She slid the small jar to Jessica. "If we cry we can probably stay until lunch."

"If I weren't already dead," Leah said as she spit another flake of torn skin toward their table, "I'd kill myself."

Their apathy was disconcerting. Not that I begrudged the lot their lack of sorrow, but if a teen mother taking her own life wasn't enough to motivate even a sniffle, I was going to need a tragedy on an elevated scale of awful to feed my fix. But then that's the thing about addiction, like violence, we become desensitized until the dosage that once satisfied the appetite is no longer enough. We need more of it and more often to achieve the high.

Heavy doors smacked shut behind me as I entered the empty hallway. Rather than return to class and the dull drone of gossip, I made my way through the stagecraft shop, across the dark stage, and up the stairwell to the roof of the auditorium. There my toes hung off the raised ledge.

When I needed to clear my head, I played a little game with my equilibrium. Holding my muscles rigid, my balance swayed. Forward. Backward. Wind tilted me to and fro while I pondered a sudden impact and stared at the ground below.

Would I stop myself if I felt my body leaning past the point of stability?

My concentration was broken by something out of place. Smoke invaded my nostrils as I inhaled, sweet and savory. Pivoting on the ledge, my back to the parking lot, I saw a stranger leaning against the door to the stairwell, hands stuffed in his coat pockets and a black cigarette hanging from his lips.

"You don't mind if I smoke," he said, without the courtesy of a rhetorical question, the burning stick bobbing on each syllable.

I pondered over his features for a moment, trying to place him. There were a finite few faces in this town and I was acquainted with most of them. He was something else.

"No." I became stuck on his eyes, the intent manner in which he observed me. "I didn't hear you come up. How long have you been there?"

"Are you going to jump?" He might as well have asked for the time or a weather report from my perch.

"No."

Holding the cigarette, he took another drag and expelled the smoke through his nose. "Why not?"

"No reason." Another wave of sweet and savory washed over my face. My hair caught and curled in the wind. I listed backward a fraction, allowing the momentum. He didn't twitch a muscle. "Were you going to stop me?"

"No." Flicking the ashes, the cigarette was replaced between his lips. "I wanted to watch."


	2. Chapter 2

**The Northland Fires**

**Chapter 2**

**Beta: Hadley Hemingway**

I wanted to be cremated when I died. If more people understood the process of preparing a corpse for burial, they wouldn't commit their bodies to such invasive practices.

After death, the skin loses moisture and elasticity. Cheeks contract. Eyes descend into the skull. Basically, everyone looks like a malnourished meth addict. To correct this, grated plastic cones are inserted behind the eyelids before they're glued shut. The mouth is sewn closed through the gums, using a gun that shoots holes through the upper palate and nasal cavity, connecting it to the lower jaw. Caulk is injected behind the lips and around the gums to plump the face. Organs are removed, soaked in an embalming solution of formaldehyde, methanol, and other solvents, then placed in a plastic bag that is inserted into the open chest cavity. Bodily fluids are drained out and chemicals pumped in, creating a vessel of bone, muscle, tissue, and carcinogens.

One day, generations from now, developers will mow down the trees and overgrown lawns of cemeteries. A human population of 6 billion will have metastasized to 20 or 30 billion. Thousands living in massive skyscrapers that dwarf today's towers. Maybe they pour a cement foundation over the long-forgotten plots. Caskets break open, leaking toxic chemicals into the soil. If they have the foresight to prevent an environmental catastrophe, they burn the bodies, disposing of the hazardous waste, as should occur, if not for the shared delusion of posterity.

Funerals, like religion, are a form of socially acceptable hysteria born in psychosis.

I left school early after my rooftop mediation was interrupted by the smoking stranger who wanted to watch me paint the pavement with a self-portrait of wasted youth.

In the white, sterile basement of the Crestwater Funeral Home, Waylon Forge sat on a rolling stool beside the cold corpse displayed on a metal prep table. A mixture of two parts 032 Barcelona to one part 174 Cheyenne colored her face. 343 California Rose brightened her cheeks, lips touched by 426 Dusky. Waylon was a doll maker, an artist playing with needles and flesh.

The most human interaction the 56-year-old man with anemic skin and grey hair around a steep widow's peak enjoyed was a new client silent and stiff on his stainless steel table. His spine curved and shoulders hunched, Waylon pulled a mascara brush through her lashes with long, brittle fingers.

Entering the room, I dropped my backpack beside the sink. He flinched, but didn't turn around. "I'm here to help," I said.

"S-shouldn't you be at s-school?" he asked, enunciating slowly, as he thought about forming the words in his mouth. Waylon's voice was soft, timid, and tainted by notes of lungs tarred black.

"I left early. This is a better use of my time."

Replacing the brush inside its tube, Waylon pulled the protective collar of white tissue paper from around her neck and tossed the crumpled wad in the trash can. He fiddled with the silver pendant resting at the base of her throat, making sure that it laid just so. "I like overdoses," he said. "Little damage to the t-t-tissue. No bruises or holes to fill. S-she's very pretty."

If only you could buy baby food with such sentiments.

Waylon stood, packing up the rolling makeup case that contained a department store worth of cosmetics. "You can do her hair. The viewing is at s-s-seven," he said, wincing as he spit the last syllable. He peeled off his blue lab coat and hung it on the wall beside the door as he left me to my work.

Junior year, I had wandered away from James Hunter's wake and into this basement. Waylon found me admiring his Porti-Boy Mark V embalming machine. Though the man rarely spoke—his chronic stuttering made conversation cumbersome—he went on at length about the intricacies of sucking out and pumping in fluids. When we landed on the subject of chemistry, he offered me a part-time job as his apprentice. Charlie approved, so long as it kept me occupied and out of trouble.

To the tune of Johnny Rotten on the stereo dock, I shrugged on my lab coat. Latex snapped against my wrists as I shoved my hands inside a pair of gloves.

"I hate that dress," Leah said, tapping her fingernails on the brushed-metal surface of the counter behind me.

"Seth picked it out."

"Figures." She sat her ass on the counter—the dead had no use for chairs, it seemed—and kicked her heels against the white cabinet doors. "My brother has shit taste."

"What do you want me to do with your hair?" I asked. Standing over Leah's body, I combed through the black strands that fell to her chest. She had great tits. Symmetrical. The kind that held up a towel with a perfect crease in the center. When she showered next to me after gym class, I looked at them sometimes. The right one had a tiny freckle on the side.

"The fuck do I care?"

"It's your viewing. How do you want to be remembered?"

"Who dressed me?" Leah rounded the table, examining the prepared shell of herself. "Am I wearing underwear? Are people buried in underwear?"

"Yes." I lifted the bottom of her dress to reveal the tight plastic panties, like shrink-wrapped nether regions. "Waylon dressed you."

"Eww, seriously? That's…" she cringed, shaking a chill from her shoulders. "Gross."

"The plastic seals in the bodily gases."

"Jesus Christ. Dying is a goddamn indignity."

"And he stuffed your ass and cunt with cotton. So, have fun with that thought."

"Good thing I haven't eaten in days." An appropriate look of disgust disfigured her expression. "Do you think he takes, you know, liberties?"

"Waylon? Definitely."

After sanitizing the remains, one of the first steps is to massage the neck, hands, arms, and legs to loosen the body from rigor mortis. Maggie Allen, junior year, was my first.

"And what," she said, "you like to watch?" Behind me, Leah rummaged in the drawers. Metal clinked as she rifled through the contents of surgical instruments.

"I mix his chemicals, prep the paints, and assist with grooming." Setting the base of Leah's skull in the brace to elevate her head, I continued combing her hair, allowing the length to hang off the edge of the table.

"Chop it off," she said, spinning a large pair of scissors around her forefinger. The blades glinted, winking their mischief.

Leah looked good with a bob. Elegant.

xXx

The mortuary chapel smelled of potpourri and vanilla candles. Two large sprays of white flowers sat on either end of Leah's polished casket. Amidst the backdrop of floral wallpaper and flickering votives, visitors filed in to sign the guestbook and make their way up the center aisle to view the deceased. The town had this routine down pat. Pull out the same black dress, the same suit. Offer the rehearsed, shallow sentiments to the grieving family. Stand around gossiping for an appropriate period of time. Sit politely through the brief words of remembrance. Do it all again at the funeral, at the next wake, for the next dearly departed.

To call those in attendance "mourners" was an overstatement. To them, the dead girl was a cautionary tale, fodder the next book club meeting. Not even Mrs. Clearwater appeared particularly stricken. With vacant eyes, she stared at the wall while guests clasped her hands in the receiving line, one after another. Hers was a quiet fury. This wake, this parade of shame, was one last injustice she'd suffer at the hands of her daughter. As if Leah's suicide was an act of vengeance or teenage rebellion. Her husband, Harry, looked beside himself, in the midst of an out-of-body experience. He nodded and spoke, but all lucidity was absent from his expression.

Absent altogether was Seth. I found him in the hallway, slumped over on the sofa with elbows on his knees and hands in his hair. He was the spitting image of his twin sister. A little taller, but with the same jet black hair and coffee skin. Grief radiated from his defeated posture.

"Hey," I said, sitting next to him.

"Are they looking for me?" he asked, mumbling at the floor.

"No, you're safe."

"I haven't slept. I don't think I ate today. Casserole dishes have been showing up in my kitchen all afternoon. The whole house stinks of flowers and cream of mushroom soup."

"When people say, 'It's the least I could do,' they usually mean it. Call up Sadie's to order the same funeral arrangement and card they sent to the last family. Pull out the recipe they wouldn't force on their dogs. Then it's their turn to sit on this couch and the vicious cycle repeats."

"Why do we do this to ourselves?"

"Because no matter how many times we go through the motions, it always feels like the first time. We go fucking stupid when someone dies. It's basically anal sex."

Seth dropped his hands and inclined his head in my direction. Tired, bloodshot eyes looked up at me. After a few solid seconds of blank silence, he smiled. "Anal," he repeated.

"Yep. Anal."

Shaking his head, he slouched against the back of the sofa. "You're the weirdest person I know." Seth closed his eyes, exhaling in one long breath. He yanked on the knot around his neck to loosen the tie and unbuttoned the collar of his shirt. "I'm supposed to give a speech. I spent all day trying to think of something to say, but I just keep hearing her voice, like she's standing over my shoulder, telling me I'm an idiot."

"People expect you to say she was so full of life, love, and fucking pixie dust. They want you to get up there and say that we won't ever know what was going on in her troubled mind, that no matter what you will always love your sister, and that, hopefully, she's found peace in a better place."

"Do you believe that?" There it was, that pleading, expectant, 'is there really a Santa Claus?' look on his face. And I didn't have the heart or tact to lie to him.

"No."

"So what do I say?" he asked, returning to rest his elbows on his knees and stare at the floor.

"You've got a free pass for about 24 hours after they put her in the ground. You could whip out your dick and take a piss on a crucifix, no one would hold it against you. So," I said, placing two white pills on his leg, "what would Leah do with that kind of freedom?"

The answer, as it turned out, was to invite the good people of Northland to suck his cock. I had to give him points for brevity. Seeing as how I had created this monster, I felt it my duty to facilitate his escape when the church ladies gasped, Sue Clearwater cursed, and Charlie scowled at me with that accusatory crease between his brows.

As we hauled ass through the parking lot toward my truck, the scent of sweet and savory smoke tickled my nose. Pulling away, I spotted a dark silhouette and a single point of orange light in the shadow of the building. Perhaps my smoking stranger hoped I would relinquish all hope before day's end, making good on the promise of a girl poised on a ledge.

xXx

I wanted to drown in the taste of colors and melting faces that sprouted jellyfish tendrils of rainbow electricity. I wanted to feel noise, rampant sound sensations that smelled of mint lightning. Imagination so exquisitely terrifying that it left deposits of vivid recollection in fluid sacs of unbidden delight embedded in my spinal cord. Flashbacks on a hair-trigger like a strand of string theory caught between space and time.

On the lake shore, vehicles rimmed a bonfire licking at the moon. Hooded Vulcans shot the pyre with long streams of lighter fluid like pissing into the apocalypse, encouraging the flames. Twisting fingers reached out from the opaque background of the forest toward the mirror surface of Lake Blessing. The pebble beach appeared as millions of stony crabs skittering one over another, a constant migration of moving parts. Smoke billowed into the air. Conflagration on my tongue. My head swam as I rode the pendulum of the chemical-induced tide.

While Seth knocked back Jäger straight from the bottle and fired a BB gun at innocent foliage, I turned up the volume on Jonny Lang and stared up at the stars from the bed of my truck. The boys were bent on destruction tonight, riding a crafted cocktail of uppers and downers, handpicked to perpetuate the mood of lawless inhibition. Howls and squealing metal echoed through the mountain valley as Paul made a trampoline of his pickup and Jared launched rocks through the air with the crack of a baseball bat. Overhead, the stars swam like cereal in chocolate milk, a comet trail of rice dust streaking across the sky.

The lake sat on the border of two states, governed by none. This was the sovereign territory of the disenchanted. Hardly a secret as our parents had soiled this land just as their parents before them. The spot was a padded cell with the illusion of autonomy. We could be found at any moment, but no one ever came looking.


	3. Chapter 3

The wrinkled imprint of my pillowcase still creased my cheek as I lay in bed. A thin shaft of light cut through my bedroom. I followed its path as it crept closer, slipping down the windowsill and stretching along the faded floorboards. Morning's ray of subdued grey urged a cockroach skittering across the floor to seek the shadows.

They say that if you see one roach, it means there are hundreds more crawling in the walls and tiny crevices.

I watched through the blurry vision of dehydrated eyes as the cockroach crawled to the darkest corner of the room and tried to scale the wall. Four inches, maybe five, then it tumbled to the floor. A failed attempt at upward mobility.

The creature lay on its back, legs wiggling, clawing at the air. Six little limbs scratched at nothing. It struggled. It writhed in vain to right itself. Minutes, maybe. And then the felled insect became resigned to its fate: the immutable truth that it could not undo what gravity had enacted. Stillness. I wondered what thoughts could occupy its mind as it gazed on its upturned world.

Did the cockroach have an intelligent concept of its own existence? Was it aware of its place in the larger universe around it? Were we?

My bedroom door rattled against the jamb and shook the walls as Charlie pounded his fist against it.

"Time to get up," he barked. Always one-half minute before my alarm went off. I counted.

The window beyond the foot of my bed faced its identical twin on the second floor of the neighbor's house. A mirror image of this one. I sat up to find Jacob Black shirtless 20 yards away. He stared at me until I threw off the blankets and headed for the bathroom.

Charlie was hunched over the kitchen table when I came downstairs. He sipped his coffee and read the newspaper while I put two Pop Tarts in the toaster. After every sip, he sucked the remnants from his thick, black mustache. He pulled his bottom lip over the coarse bristles. Like teeth dragging against sandpaper.

"You were late last night," he said.

Standing at the laminate counter, I watched the metal coils turn red inside the toaster. "I took Seth to the lake."

"And you skipped school." Paper rustled as he handled it and flicked the pages to stiffen their posture.

"To help Waylon. There was an assembly after third period. Not like I missed anything."

"You don't get to decide what's important."

"I'm eighteen," I said, opening the fridge to pour a glass of milk. "How about I drop out and get my GED?"

The coffee cup landed hard on the table behind me. "I'll tan your ass raw if I hear that come out of your mouth again, girl."

I bit my lip, counted to ten, and clenched the edge of the counter until both hands turned white. "When I bring home my first B, I'll go outside and pick a switch."

Two strawberry Pop Tarts shot out of their parallel slots. Palming one and shoving the other scalding slab in my mouth, I fled before Charlie could finish his angry retort.

Cars rolled into the school parking while I read in my truck. I wasn't resigned. I hadn't accepted that fate was an unyielding sentence to wallow in this hick town until I ended up pregnant, married, and bleeding out in a bathtub. No, I had a plan. It started with earning a scholarship and going to college in another time zone.

Since the age at which teachers began assigning letter grades rather than emoticons, I applied myself to schoolwork. It became my addiction. Four more months of compulsive reading and toiling under the glare of a light emitting diode screen and I would have won my ticket out of here, never to look back.

If Northland were a drowning man, I'd toss it a barbell.

A heavy hand rapped at my window. Jacob didn't smile. Not ever. Like the rest of his cousins, he had jet-black hair and dark eyes that seemed to swallow light. That family ate lives whole. He tapped on the glass again, so I dog-earned my page and tossed the book aside. Cold air spilled in over the lowering window.

"Yeah?" I asked.

Jacob leaned against the truck, eclipsing the parking lot with his broad shoulders. "Missed you last night. I went down to the lake, but Seth said you left early."

"Yeah."

"I didn't see your truck when I got home."

"Keen observation."

"Where'd you go?"

"Somewhere else." I grabbed my bag and shoved the door at Jacob's chest until he backed off enough for me to get out of the truck. "You sound like Charlie. So maybe you could work on that. Like don't." I rolled up the window and slammed the door shut.

He followed me across the lot toward the main building. One of his strides slapped damp pavement to every two of mine. "Are you going to the funeral?"

"No."

The Clearwaters had made it crystal the funeral was to be a private occasion. They'd done their duty to serve Leah up as the latest spectacle, we'd all sucked our fill at the wake, and now her parents and half-dozen houses of extended family had earned the right to bury their embarrassment in peace.

"I could bring you," he said. Jacob held open the door with one long arm stretched over my head. Slamming lockers and conversation echoed down the long corridor. "I mean, it would be okay if you came with me."

"Like a date," I said, weaving through foot traffic. "To a suicide's funeral."

"To pay your respects." He grabbed my shoulder to stop my attempt at outrunning this conversation. My eyes climbed to his and I smacked his hand away. "You should start getting used to the idea—"

"Jacob, you grab me like that again, I'll stab you in your sleep."

Something knocked him sideways. Rather, someone. The suspect left a scented trail of savory and sweet in his wake, but all I caught was the back of his head disappearing into the crowd.

"Watch where you're going, asshole."

An arm clothed in black rose toward the ceiling with a one-finger salute.

Right about the time Aunt Flow drew first blood, Charlie got it in his head that I was to be offered up to the Black family like blue-ribbon livestock. Both Billy and Charlie were widowers, if you wanted to apply the term loosely, and both had one child to match and marry off. Seeing as how the Blacks were related to half the town, Jacob's options for non-incestuous mating were limited.

Thing was, no matter how many times I reiterated my desire to escape this hellish chasm of monotony and low expectations or die trying, the notion never set in with the men plotting my barefooted future. Perhaps this was because so few ever grew beyond the pre-ordained example of their predecessors. They were content to wait me out, wear me down, and stand ready at the altar to fit a noose around my neck when I surrendered.

Fat fucking chance.

But if Jacob wanted to rub one out to the fantasy of lynching the neighbor girl in holy matrimony, well, the fuck did I care? He wasn't the most loathsome male in my age bracket and socializing kept Charlie quietly appeased. So be it. I played my part at a distance and waited for an acceptance letter that would set me on the road to brighter elsewheres.

In science class, the surface of my lab table read like a yearbook. A family tree engraved in the black water-resistant, chemical-resistant laminate. The handwriting changed while many of the initials stayed the same. The chiseled dick pics became more inventive and graphic.

Some clever shit left a condom on the table. Whether it was a gift for me from a concerned peer or a token placed in memorial for my deceased lab partner, I wasn't sure. In either case, I gained nothing by acknowledging the matter.

I felt the attention on the back of my head as students filed into the room and whispered conversations caught latecomers up on the witty gag. Stronger, though, was the lure of something dark in my periphery.

My eyes were drawn beyond the window to the snow-covered picnic table under the sagging bows of a hemlock. Dressed in black and a permanent haze of smoke twisting in the air around him, the stranger stared at me. The only movement was hand to mouth and the flick of his thumb that sent invisible ashes sailing with the wind.

I considered going to him. Twice is a coincidence and thrice is a trend. A fourth appearance constituted stalking. And while I wasn't especially burdened by his interest, the stranger had piqued my curiosity. He was new. An unknown quantity. Indeterminate forms bugged me.

The bell rang. Mr. Brandon shut the door. I blinked and missed it again. My smoking stranger was gone.


	4. Chapter 4

Wind tossed dead leaves over the mound of disturbed earth surrounded by a blanket of snow. The steady current of damp, cold air sang like a chorus through the trees, traveling across the landscape dotted by uneven rows of marble and granite poking out of the ground. Cemeteries are beautiful, peaceful wastes of glorious space that would otherwise be parking lots, strip malls. To preserve green spaces, will fill them with corpses.

There were no heart-felt sentiments etched on Leah's tombstone. No angelic images carved on the modest monument that stood as a testament to her short, unremarkable existence. Seven billion people on the planet, 150,000 die every day, and none but a few hundred in a small, unimportant town noticed her come and go. In a generation, no one would remember she existed at all. The ceremonial trappings of her funeral were gone, save for a single floral arrangement. Her family remained only as a dozen sets of muddy footprints leading away from a filled hole in the ground.

At school, sanctifying the idea of the head cheerleader was a social occasion. An event. A pep rally for the dead. Torn pieces of notebook paper taped to her locker. Flowers placed on the linoleum floor beside pom-poms and photos. Cute little teddy bears hugging fluffy hearts. It was performance art.

She should have hung herself with a note pinned to her chest. A John Donne poem scratched out in sloppy handwriting. A cryptic passage from the Kabbalah orOde on a Grecian Urn written in permanent maker on her arms to confound the population for weeks. She should have thrown herself off Hawk's Bridge. There would have been search parties and boats called in from 100 miles away to dredge the river in search of her blue, bloated body. Candlelight vigils held in her honor. She could have been a spectacle, remembered.

Now she becomes cardboard boxes of clothing disseminated by the church to those in need, in another town. The bed where her twin brother found her facedown in a puddle of bile gets shipped off to the landfill. The desk where Leah did her homework is strapped to a pickup truck and dumped at Goodwill. And they won't care where it came from.

I came here expecting an appearance from my smoking stranger, the stalker of death. As the sun fell beyond the horizon, I left disappointed.

xXx

Charlie's cruiser sat in the driveway when I got home. He was early. I heard the sound of the sports recap on television before I put my key in the front door. That television was the newest, most expensive thing in the house. We had a dishwasher from 1984 that left 30 years worth of hard water stains and buildup on everything, but Charlie bought a new TV every three years. Plasma. LED. HD. Flat screen. 100 channels and an On Demand universe of nothing. He only watched three channels. Inside, a colony of empty beer cans littered the coffee table. I hung my coat on the hook without making eye contact. The squeaky recliner footrest clicked shut, leveraging Charlie forward.

"Where've you been?" he asked over the loud volume of the day's headlines on TV.

"I—"

"You weren't at the funeral." He still wore his dark blue uniform. Belt around his waist. Gun in the holster.

"It was only for family." The woven texture of my backpack's nylon straps slid between my fingers as I pulled the bag from my shoulders. These things were giving us scoliosis.

"Are you back-talking me?" An angry vein in Charlie's forehead swelled. He leaned forward to rip another can from its plastic ring. One of those rings that show up wrapped around a duck's neck in a National Geographic photo. The kind they find with license plates and bike tires in a shark's gut.

"No." I never looked directly into his eyes. Always at his nose or hairline. "I've got homework to do."

Upstairs, I shut my door and dumped my books on the bed. A grand slam replay might snag his attention. A countdown of the top 10 Hail Mary passes could make him forget about me. I got one shoe off before he threw open my bedroom door.

"Billy invited us. I know Jake told you." Charlie's bottom lip dragged over his thick mustache, sucking at the traces of domestic hops and piss water stuck in the coarse hairs. Sandpaper. The sound made my eye twitch.

"You said I wasn't supposed to skip class."

"Don't get sassy with me, girl." The beer can he held landed on my desk with a metallic thunk. He never put down a beer unless he needed both hands to get his point across. "There are expectations. How many times I got to tell you that? The mayor was there with his kids. The pastor—"

"He's supposed to be there."

"You better slap a lock on that smart mouth." Charlie's hand rested on his belt, just in front of the holstered pistol, as if he liked drawing attention to the weapon. "I have responsibilities in this town, Bella. And so do you."

"You should have said—"

"I should?" He kicked the corner of the door. It smacked the wall. Hangers and towels fell off the back of the door, clattering on the wood floor. "You gonna tell me what I should do?"

"You didn't say anything about going to the funeral this morning." I didn't dare retreat. Running only made him want to give chase. He charged forward and closed his hand like a vice around my arm, squeezing. I stared at his chest, at glowing lamp on my desk, but never his eyes.

"I gotta stand there and tell people what? My ingrate daughter is too good to go to a funeral?" His grip tightened. My fingers went numb.

"I didn't say that."

"Everybody talks about you. You made a damn fool outta me at that wake. You got a big kick outta that, didn't you?"

"Seth—"

My vision went sideways. Pain burned hot across my cheek. "I'm not gonna let you embarrass me." He grabbed a chunk of my hair, tugging right at the scalp, and hurled me at the bed. "So help me God, I'm gonna teach you some respect." Something heavy dropped to the bed beside my face. Next, it was the sound of leather snapping. "It's my job to straighten you out."

I didn't scream. I didn't cry. Facedown on the bed, I stared at the holstered pistol on Charlie's police belt lying beside me. Fifteen lashes across my back, my fingers digging into the sheets, but I didn't make a sound.

"Tomorrow," he said, grabbing the belt and gun from mattress, "you apologize to Jacob." The door rattled the walls as it slammed shut.

Across the yard, in the window that stared into mine, Jake watched. He didn't flinch. No emotion in those dark, dead eyes. Perhaps he thought this was good training for how to tame the unruly girl next door when he finally got his leash around my neck. Then Jake's attention was drawn below. I picked myself up and went to draw the curtains. Raising my arms just a few inches made every inch of my back erupt in fire. I followed Jake's gaze to the ground, where under the tree that separated our yards, a shadowed figure stood in a haze of smoke.


	5. Chapter 5

**The Northland Fires**

**Chapter 5**

**Beta: Hadley Hemingway**

The bathroom door creaked and clicked. Metallic rings slid across the aluminum shower rod and dragged the plastic curtain, stained with lime and calcium, along the bottom like drip-dyed art. Charlie began his morning routine.

Patterns. Sad flowers covering the comforter that draped my bed since I grew out of a crib. The creak and click. The slide and drag. The moan of warped floorboards and thudding echo under the hollow stairs. Scratches in the skillet heating on the stove. The shapes that formed in the egg yolks spreading out across the pan.

Last night I sat in a tub of freezing water until the pain turned to a dull ache and my nerves went numb. I didn't sleep.

While strips of bacon bubbled and the fat shot grease bullets, I popped a Vicodin.

Charlie's breakfast was hot and waiting when he entered the kitchen, his paper folded just so beside a hot cup of coffee. He watched his fork, the words on the page. I watched the back of his head. This was our ritual. Penance for the evening's transgressions.

Charlie never apologized because he was never sorry. He didn't have regrets, except perhaps for my conception, so he never felt the burden of guilt or remorse. I respected that, in a sense. What a simple, unencumbered way to live. It is amazing what one can accomplish when shame and morality are only ideas that apply to other people. Commit to single-minded objectivism. Pursue self-interest above all. Admit to nothing. And be free.

Was I not my father's daughter, this man of few words and a 1000-yard stare, a product of his nature? Nurtured in this incestuous womb forever replicating in on itself. Repeating. Propagating mild, detrimental regularity until its mass overwhelms the core. Cataclysmic failure. Total inhalation.

Charlie sucked the bristles of his mustache. "Remember what I said."

I wasn't the forgetful type.

Charlie wanted me to grovel at Jacob's feet, acclimate to the subservient posture, and beg forgiveness. Half a second Vic sat under my tongue on the way to school. The strategic time release allowed for a gentle delivery, an IV drip. More than two Vicodin in four hours makes me lopsided, like walking the deck of a listing ship. The horizon remains level, yet everything in my vicinity leans to port and deck chairs crash against the rails, toppling into the churning sea below.

A Vicodin high is graceless peace. In your ship of perception, time slows. Like drowning. Head fills with water. Lungs flood. You grow gills and float among the current. Sound is Pink Floyd playing through padded walls. Whale calls. Tones and muffled echo. Light disperses and everything is a shapeless rainbow, a smudge.

Except the horizon is level and that horizon is a hallway churning with human obstacles. A classroom ordered and organized in neat rows. You are a free-floating jellyfish, but they see a suffocating fish flopping on the linoleum floor. Three pills in as many hours and I wouldn't have the faculties to point out my own nose.

One half a Vicodin under my tongue at breakfast, another after lunch. Then I can function. Then I remain upright and the vanishing point is straight and fixed.

The vanishing point, as I crossed the parking lot to the B building and my locker, was a tiny dot of orange sticking out from the wooded shadows. I veered in that direction until my horizon was obscured by one of those human obstacles.

"We need to talk."

Jacob blotted out the blurry sun racing grey clouds across the sky. I stared at his chest. Through it, to the obscured vision of my stranger stalking in the distance. The orange glow of his cigarette burned in the center of Jake's abdomen. The fabric of Jake's shirt melted and frayed open, peeling back, curling at the edges. Tan skin boiled and turned black. A volcano erupted from his chest, spewing molten fire.

"Bella," he said, snapping his fingers. A car door slammed. The first bell rang. Three minutes to get to class.

"Yeah, I've got to go."

He dogged my heels as I carried my backpack in my hand. Slid through the doors. Squeezed past the locker confabs. Think thin. Be narrow. Suck it in. For fuck's sake, don't let anything graze my back or I will collapse in screaming agony. But Jake was behind me and, for him, the masses parted.

"Last night," he said.

Last night. When you watched Charlie fling his cold, bony hand across my face. I wore makeup six, seven times a year. Last night. Standing at your window with your dick in your hand while he bent me over the bed. Last night. Watching as he slapped a stiff leather belt across my spine.

And I didn't reach for the gun. And I didn't cry.

"Who is he?"

Jake smelled of motor oil and the kind of scented deodorant that entered the room on a gust of wind and tainted everything it touched. His hands were always stained one color or another, like premature liver spots. It was the grime under this nails, though, that turned my tongue sour. I thought about any girl who might have let one of those thick digits up her slipway.

"Who?" I said, and shoved my backpack in my locker.

"The guy."

"The mail man. The Easter Bunny."

Another bell wailed through the hall, pinging off the metal lockers in that way that made my ears flinch. One-minute warning.

"I saw him creeping around your house."

"A figment of your imagination," I said. "Paranoid delusions are a—"

"Maybe I should talk to Charlie." His hand got to the door handle before I could escape into my classroom. "Is your imaginary friend bulletproof? Because maybe I see a robber trying to break in, so I blow his head off."

I looked up into his cold, dead eyes and saw an overgrown child with an inflated sense of self-importance who liked to pick off rabbits with a BB gun and leave their skinned, bloody carcasses hanging in the tree outside my window.

"What do you want?" I said.

"Double."

"One week."

"A month."

"Not happening," I said. I'd sooner take my chances skipping town and dumping the truck in the river. "Two weeks and one on the house. Take or leave it."

The late bell rang. Jake released the door handle to grab my wrist. If I jabbed a ballpoint pen into his jugular, how far could I get before anyone had a chance to call the police?

"I don't have a problem with you trying to get a little strange on the side," he said. "Tell me who it is. Newton?"

"Let go. I'm late for class."

"Just remember to keep the lights off. That pussy isn't gold-plated, sweetheart. He won't want to touch you if he sees what you really look like."

"Fuck off, Jake."

I shoved my way inside. My chest caved under the weight of their stares. Twenty pairs of eyes all aimed at me. Face red. Throat tight. I couldn't breathe. I bit down on the last little clump of Vicodin dissolving in my mouth.

"You're late," the teacher said.

"Sorry."

His brow furrowed. After a moment spent cataloging my face, he scrubbed the eraser of his pencil across the attendance notebook and nodded.

"Have a seat, Bella. We have a new student. He could use your help getting caught up."

The figment of Jake's imagination had green eyes, the spotless hands of a surgeon, and smelled like an Indian tea house. And as he stared at my profile for the entirety of class, I had not even the slightest inclination to know him.


	6. Chapter 6

**The Northland Fires**

**Chapter 6**

**Beta: Hadley Hemingway**

Hot air rattled out of the vent above my desk. Breathing down my neck. The burnt scent of dust. Asbestos grains. Dead, dry flakes of human flesh and microscopic bits of rat shit and roach excrement falling from the speckled tiles of the drop ceiling.

My American History teacher leaned against the front of his desk. This made him approachable. This made him appear younger, casual. He was in touch with our youthful sensibilities. He collected condensation rings around pint glasses at the bar near the truck stop on Saturday nights. He stumbled out of motel rooms and spinsters' double-wide trailers on Sunday mornings with his shoes in his hands. A quick trip to his leaky bachelor pad before arriving shaved and polished for church. We could curse in his class. Throw out the occasional shit, fuck, or damn, so long as we had a point to make. We didn't have to raise our hands to speak.

He leaned against the front of his desk to impart some personal experience about the Reagan era. Thirty years later and everyone had forgotten the man was just a third-rate actor and a traitor who sold weapons to terrorists.

The teacher talked. Page 109. Chapter 21. I took notes.

"Follow along in your books."

But the stranger next to me, his hands folded on top of his desk. Spotless. He stared at the side of my face.

The Berlin Wall. Trickle down economics. The teacher's tie loose around his neck and one collar button open under his throat. I took notes. Berlin Wall. Trickle down.

Drip, drip, drip.

Click, click, click. The stranger thumbed the button of his ballpoint pen.

Rattle and huff.

Iran-Contra. Page 110. I scribbled notes and the stranger watched.

The bell rang. Off to the races. Out of the gate, two dozen pairs of shoes scuffed the floor. The halls were a stampede of activity, pushing and grinding. Lockers slammed to a staccato rhythm. Mike and Jessica grunted and whined in a corner. She jabbed him in the chest with one pointed, painted fingernail.

Blah, blah, blah. You're a jerk.

Blah, blah, blah. You're crazy. Let's fuck and make up.

The memorial rummage sale in front of Leah's locker had been dismantled. There was a basketball game on Friday and decorations of her death couldn't be allowed to compete with spirit banners and pep slogans.

No one who didn't share a bloodline drifted within a 10-foot radius of Seth. He stood at his locker, staring at the rusted hinges and slatted door. No one wanted to be pulled into his gravity. This was how the spiral unwound. This was where it started. When the town forgot about the twin without his other half and he became a ghost, unresolved. A lid without a pot.

Two more hours until my second half of a Vicodin dissolving under my tongue. The fabric of my shirt was sandpaper. Charlie's mustache. Road rash.

English lit. Chapter 18. Page 213.

"Follow along in your book."

In turns from the back row forward, the teacher pointed to a student to read aloud. I took notes. I made notations in the margins. And the stranger watched. Click, click, click.

Second period. Third. I crossed the threshold from the humid halls of the meat grinder. Stinging perfume stench. Suffocating cologne. Bodies, and lunches baking inside lockers. Through the threshold where the animal in the drop ceiling groaned and rattled in his cage. He blew rotten breath down my back. Rat shit.

And there was the stranger occupying the seat vacated by the dead cheerleader. The seat next to mine. He didn't have to lurk in the shadows when a closer vantage point was available beside me for six hours, five days a week.

He smelled of sweet and savory smoke, not tobacco. Cloves. Something you cook with. Something you put in tea. He smelled like earth and exotic places. The way commercials smell when a mid-30s man in a cable knit sweater sits in an adirondack chair to look out on the mountain sunset with a steaming mug in his hands. He smelled fucking great.

So I ignored him as I took a seat in third period chemistry. My specialty. My calling. A tank of gas and full ride to the University of Anywhere But Here. He leaned one elbow on the lab table. The water-resistant, chemical-resistant laminate tabletop. He stared at the side of my face as if contemplating the meaning in a piece of modern art. But it was just a light switch. Not an installation or interpretation or approximation of a light switch meant to speak about our consumption of energy. Our fear of the dark. Our insulation against the stars of the night sky. No, it was just a fucking light switch on the wall. Functional. The antithesis of modern art.

At 12, I was no one. I was furniture. I was a maid and terrible cook. Charlie came home one night and said I should do more. Earn my keep. Justify my existence. Make dinner. What did I know about cooking? My mother died, remember? She didn't check off the maternal duties of teaching me to bake a chicken breast or fry an egg before she slit her wrists. She didn't warn me about the day I would be sitting in class and feel a wet trickle between my legs. For three days I folded layers of toilet paper inside my underwear, a thick blood-soaked gusset between my legs. When Charlie asked why I had gone through four rolls in a week, why I was perpetually emptying the bathroom trash can, he called Jake's older sister to take me to the grocery store for pads.

I had to learn to cook, so I turned to the Internet. Recipes and step-by-step instructional videos. And I fell into the bottomless expanse of unlimited knowledge. Anything. Everything. The entirety of the human experience digitized and organized and available for download.

This was how I discovered chemistry. Because my mother killed herself and left me with Charlie. And beating your kid is fine. It's parenting. It is expected. You see those little bastards on TV getting into trouble and someone says, "My old man woulda tanned my ass raw if I acted up like that. No respect for authority. Parents ought to give that boy the belt. My daddy beat me, and I turned out fine."

Fine.

The skinny kid who grew up to become the skinny science teacher wrote molecular equations across the chalkboard and I took notes. Meticulous notes. And the stranger sitting on Leah's stool, staring at me from Leah's side of the table, smelling like a tea commercial, stared at the side of my face. And I wanted to tell him, move on, it's just a lightswitch.

"Will you tell me your name?" he asked.

"No."

"Do you want to know mine?"

I did. Once. Days ago. Now the fantasy of curiosity melted in streams of paint down the canvas.

Drip, drip, drip.

"If I killed him for you, would you tell me then?"

I was sitting at the lunch table with half a second Vicodin under my tongue before his words sunk in. Paul burped the noxious by-product of a government-provided meal, supplied by the lowest bidder and prepared by a minimum wage employee in a hairnet. Seth stared at his untouched sandwich. Jake and Jared communicated in a coded language of cylinders and horsepower.

Jessica talked with her hands, across the room, as she explained Mike's latest unforgivable deed to Lauren and Angela.

In the corner, alone and stoic, as if installed as a piece of performance art to express the isolation of adolescence, the stranger stared at me. He smiled. It was cruel and sarcastic. And interesting.

"What's his story?" Paul asked. He blew the putrid fumes of stomach bacteria across the table and punched his chest.

"Who?" I asked.

"The new guy. You have classes with him, right?"

"I don't do small talk."

"Did he move into the Roberts' old place?" Jared asked.

"Nah, man." Paul stuffed his face with a slice of thin, limp pizza. "Mr. Newton is tearing down that whole street to make room for a new truck depot."

"Probably came in with the new hires at the mine," Jake said.

The Newton mine brought in a small army of temporary help during the winter months to keep up with the increased demand for production. By spring, 40 or 50 single men and small families would pack up and head elsewhere looking for the next job. They stayed in motels by the freeway outside of town. Sometimes their kids would fill a few seats, then disappear at the end of the semester. The transient life of the working poor. The new normal of the vanishing American dream. Northland was a pitstop on the way to the grave.

"Get over yourself!" Mike shouted.

Tyler and the guys from the basketball team sitting four tables away laughed at Jessica. The room stretched around her. A white-hot spotlight shone down on her horrified statue.

Mike told her what a foul-smelling heap of human waste she was. He told her he wouldn't fuck her with his dog's dick, so stop begging. He threw a french fry dog treat at her and told the bitch to lick the shoe-scuffed, dirt-soiled, ammonia-bathed floor for it.

No one followed when she ran crying from the cafeteria. Everyone had a good laugh.

Jake reclined in his seat. "Bella's fucking Mike Newton."

Never in all my life had I seen such utter mortification. And I felt nothing for her.

I found Jessica with mascara running down her face in the girls' bathroom. Her hands shook as she wiped the black veins streaking over her cheeks. Our eyes met next to a fingerprint smudge on the mirror.

"Go away."

Streaks turned into long smudges. Black spots of visible humiliation stained that pretty, privileged face. A carbon copy of her mother. She wet a paper towel and scrubbed at her skin, as if rubbing hard enough might make her another person. Look up into the reflection and greet the new and improved whomever.

"Leave me alone."

Mike humiliated her. The people she called friends watched and laughed and no one lifted a hand to throw a blanket on the fire. This was the sad whimpering death of social status. This was betrayal. I had no business standing at the edge of the sink counter, watching her glue the pieces of her shattered dignity into place. Slip the mask back on.

"Go away!" A banshee screech ripped from her chest. Glass shattered around her fist. Mirror shards protruded from the bloody gash in her pale skin. "What did I ever do to you?" she said. Jessica absorbed the space between us, nose to nose. "I'd rather be laughed at than a disgusting slut."

She spit in my face. A turkey and ham-scented spray of bacteria and saliva that trickled down my chin.

Jacob never let anything go.


End file.
